


heartache

by unconscious



Series: endgame [2]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, M/M, Not A Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-16 08:22:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18687736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unconscious/pseuds/unconscious
Summary: It’s imprecise to say they fell in love. They excavated a wounded and powerful love that was always there.Scenes from Steve's life after the events of Endgame.





	heartache

**Author's Note:**

> Still not a fix-it, still technically canon-compliant. The title is inspired by [The Cryin Shames' version of Please Stay](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRIgpdNZEvA), which features prominently in this fic.

It was supposed to be a second chance.

In a way, it was. Funny how even when the deck is stacked fully in his favor Steve manages to make foolish mistakes.

He arrived in 1950. Married Peggy shortly thereafter and began seeking himself. It wasn’t until 1958 that he had the technology and the newly-established SHIELD team available to thaw himself out of the ice. Steve was at the bedside when his younger self awoke, and with a soft steady gaze he said, “Captain Rogers. I’m you from the future. Bucky is alive and I need your help to find him.”

In 1960, Peggy leaves him. At the time he was shocked—gutted, destabilized. Despite the fact that his attention had drifted further from SHIELD and his marriage and more towards the hunt for the Winter Soldier. In retrospect it’s obvious. How could she stay with him when her great love suddenly reappeared? Her great love, the normal one, the one without the future knowledge or the deep wounds of intergalactic war and five years of global-scale grief. How could she build a life with Steve when another Steve walked the world pining for her? Steve had asked Peggy to give him love, normalcy, cover, a space to heal, a secret life, and to adhere to his nebulous plans contingent on future knowledge only he could wield. Then he’d brought her another version of himself, the one she remembered.

In 1963 SHIELD prevents President Kennedy’s assassination and the Fist of Hydra comes home. Steve was not cleared to participate in the deprogramming. His younger self, however, was.

Three years later, Peggy remarries, and not to Steve. Daniel is a good man. Steve tries to resent him and finds he can only resent himself. Peggy's efficiency, previously defined by a constant simmering frustration that no one could truly keep up with her, settled into a terrifying stoic competence. She becomes Steve and his younger self’s boss, and it works surprisingly well. They get a lot done. Steve keeps a cottage in Arlington outside of DC and a studio apartment in New York City, in Chinatown. He lives alone. His younger self, though.

Younger Steve blossoms into an astonishing leader and hero. He seems unburdened. Free to move through the world with hope and grace and a determination to uplift each soul in his wake. Steve feels the weight of his own life like a millstone. He should be happy—wasn’t this his goal? Yet on dark nights in the silence of his cottage, he strains to hear a sound he know won’t come: the sound of someone opening a door and tripping half-drunk over the threshold after a shift on the docks and a drink or five to toast a hard day’s work. That someone dropping fully clothed into Steve’s narrow single bed, sweaty and stinking of seawater and cigarettes, muscled arms wrapping around his small body, a nose at his nape, and near-immediate snores.

He dreams that sometimes. Or of a body disintegrating into ash. Or of a wild feral frightened face with a wide expanse of blue sky behind it. Or a fall.

Steve is in DC for a few weeks in November 1966, overseeing new SHIELD training exercises. In the basement of the facility he’s seated in a chair at the far end of the long, narrow training bunker. He’s finishing up on some overdue paperwork, supposedly, but he’s here really to watch and coach his younger self. Still it shocks him to see his own body in action this way. The movements appear effortless and beautiful. Doing them, though, the feeling is just that of pain and power and efficiency. Never beauty. He watches as younger Steve throws the shield mid-leap, and the shield slices through two targets before ricocheting off the wall, floor, ceiling, and wall again before rocketing back towards younger Steve’s hands. But the return is off slightly, and the shield slips through his grasp and fires towards Steve, who catches it with both hands before it takes out his teeth.

“Sorry,” younger Steve says. He’s pink-faced with exertion. “It doesn’t seem right that it should pick up velocity after hitting something.”

“That’s vibranium for you,” Steve says, and tosses it back. “Think about catching with your knees instead of your hands. You need your whole body to absorb the speed if you’re going to stop it moving. Try it again.”

Younger Steve nods and looks at him for a long moment before steps closer, near to the rickety chair Steve’s hauled down here for these sessions. “Commander Carter, permission to speak freely?” (And that was what he’d asked for, brokenly, when Peggy had divorced him—her blessing to keep her name.)

“Of course, Captain,” Steve says easily.

“In your life,” younger Steve says, “Did your Bucky ever love you back?”

Stunned, Steve says nothing.

The color drains from younger Steve’s face. “I mean—as I understood from how you explained it to me, sir, is that we have the same history up until you came here, sir, which means we had the same thirties, and I remember—sorry sir, talking about it, you know, it’s hard to explain—longing, I guess. Longing for something more in our friendship but when I was small I was so sure he was only interested in dames—did you feel that way?”

The memories brew like a storm inside him. Bucky lean and tan on their fire escape chain-smoking in the summer heat. The way he'd read pulps silently in their living room, standing up during the exciting parts because he couldn't keep still. Sharing a bed with him in the coldest winter months, desperately wanting to touch every burning hot inch of skin. “Yes,” Steve says finally, half to his younger self, half to the self he has become now. “But—I didn’t get out of the ice until the two-thousands. Buck had been the Soldier for seventy years when I found him. And after that it was just—war. All the time. We didn’t have enough time to figure it out, I guess.”

A very small voice inside him—small enough to ignore because anything louder would infect him and kill him from the inside out like a cancer—says: Because I left.

“Oh.” Younger Steve looks a little deflated. “I was hoping—He kissed me last night.”

Steve's heart plummets. And younger Steve, always so brave (was he ever this brave?), continues. “I came home from SHIELD and I had picked up chocolate ice cream for us. No reason. Just because I wanted it and he’s a fiend for chocolate.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Steve murmurs.

“And when I gave it to him he said, ‘You didn’t get any butter pecan?’ And I said—” Here his younger self switches to flawless Russian, “‘You should be grateful it is not beet-flavored, soldat.’ Then,” he says, in English, his cheeks beet-colored, “He kissed me.”

Steve can’t seem to find his words.

“He likes to joke around in Russian,” younger Steve explains awkwardly. “He says it helps with the fear.”

His own life was so riddled with violence and loss. That terrible life. Is it possible, Steve thinks hysterically, is it possible it was enough? “What was it like?”

“Like…” Younger Steve thinks for a moment. Then he whirls around and hurls the shield down the length of the training bunker, so hard it cracks against the far wall and comes whistling back like a bullet cleanly into his hands. “Like that. Like something tough going right. Like—like it’s what I’m meant to be doing.”

 

It’s imprecise to say they fell in love. Rather his younger self and a younger Bucky slowly excavated a wounded and powerful love that was always there.

 

As the years pass, Steve watches his younger self and Bucky grow more entwined. The vocabulary of their shared language expands. He watches them in Avengers meetings make decisions through the barest shoulder movement and an eyebrow furrow. He watches Bucky’s protective touches on younger Steve’s body as if he was still small: a guiding hand on the small of his back, a gentle kneading at the back of his neck after a stressful debrief. He watches them grow strong and radiant and handsome together. Not just surviving, but living. Healing. Coping with some losses and avoiding others. Building something new together. The worst part, Steve admits to himself late at night in the cool darkness of his Chinatown studio in 1974, is that the foundation of their friendship is unchanged. Still teasing. Still bitching. Still putting each others’ needs first. Endlessly trying to protect the other from an unforgiving world. Still fighting it together back to back like they shared a heartbeat.

Younger Bucky is closer to the Bucky he remembers from before the war than the one he left behind in 2023—but that older Bucky is the one that prowls his dreams. The sardonic twist to his mouth. The birdlike stillness and grace of his movements. His cutting, surprising humor. How when things got bad, got confusing, he looked to Steve as an anchor to their reality, and Steve looked back.

He got him back from captivity in the war. He got him back from the ice and the soul-severing torture. He got him back from the Vanishing. And on that platform at Tony’s funeral he stood there, looked down at Bucky—the one constant in his life, his anchor, his soul’s twin three times returned somehow from death, the only one to see Steve in every iteration and still come back, still love him—and chose someone else.

It’s early fall in New York and the days haven’t quite shortened yet, so the lowering sun bathes the city in reds and golds. He keeps the window cracked to hear the Mandarin and Cantonese in the street and the rumbling of the train. Steve finally unfolds from where he was curled in on himself, leaning against the wall and the side of his bed. He drags himself to his bathroom and spits into the sink. In the mirror his face is lined and pallid. The Ellington record spinning in the kitchenette has turned to the thunks and hums of completion.

A cowardly, small, ferocious part of him knows: if he were ever worthy of Bucky’s love, he isn’t now.

He opens his medicine cabinet and rifles around for the painkillers that don’t work. (Perhaps he’ll take them all at once.) He shakes a few into his hand and swallows them dry knowing it won’t do a damn thing for his aching body. He had wished for a new life. A life without pain. If only he had realized that meant no life at all. 

In desperation he calls the only person he considers something resembling a friend.

“Commander?”

“Rogers, I—” He hears laughter in the background. Something metal hitting a floor. “Ah, sorry, I’m interrupting, it’s not urgent.”

But something in his voice must be different. Different in a way that perhaps only his younger self could catch. “We’re just making dinner over here in Brooklyn, Commander, why don’t you join us?”

 

Clinton Hill is just a short rattling train ride across the Manhattan Bridge and an ambling dozen block walk down DeKalb through a Brooklyn he still loves, its buildings not yet soaring, its residents still grouchy and diverse. Steve changed into a white button-up shirt with his jeans, though he never liked the long pointed collars of the seventies, as well as his thick-framed glasses lest anyone mistake Steven Carter for Steve Rogers. He picks up a bottle of wine at a corner store and finds the address his younger self gave him over the phone.

It’s two stories, brick, with a tiny front yard and porch, an anomaly among the big beautiful four-story units on Washington Avenue. Around the corner there’s a laundromat and a Jewish deli. Pratt Institute, not yet at its height of prestige, is just a few blocks north—where his younger self takes life drawing classes when he has time. Two parks flanking their block. And—this is the part that makes Steve’s heart clench—it’s on the same block as the library. He imagines Steve and Bucky deciding between properties, Bucky insisting they pay more to live in a smaller house for the luxury of being so close. 

Steve knocks. Bucky answers.

These days, his interactions with Bucky are limited to work functions, typically with younger Steve nearby. He was prepared to smile at his younger self, but not at this version of Bucky, with his hair a little long and mussed and unstyled, his face open, his bare feet on the hardwood floor. There’s so many timelines in his head, so many moments like this that both occurred and didn’t, it makes Steve dizzy.

“Commander,” Bucky says, welcoming him in with a wide, playful sweep of his arm, “Come in, Steve’s just finishing burning the meal.” From the kitchen, younger Steve says “Hey!” indignantly.

“Nice place,” Steve manages. The ground floor has a kitchen, bathroom, living room, and a tiny breakfast nook in the street-facing windows that is apparently more like a reading nook for all the paperbacks stacked there. Bucky’s love of pulps hasn’t waned, it looks like, for all the Le Carre novels. The living room has a lovely hearth and built-ins teeming with books, a small coffee table, a record player, an overstuffed couch and chairs. He follows Bucky to the kitchen, where a table is set for three, and younger Steve is pulling chicken breasts out of the oven.

“Commander,” younger Steve says with an open smile.

“He brought wine,” Bucky says, and wiggles his eyebrows at both of them. Bucky takes the wine as Steve offers it, pulls a small knife from his pocket, slides the blade into the cork, and extracts it deftly with his metal arm.

“He’s showing off for you,” younger Steve says without looking.

Bucky, God save Steve’s soul, blushes.

Sitting at the table with the two of them, eating chicken breasts and rice and green beans and rye from the deli and butter pecan ice cream and red wine, Steve feels, for what seems to be the first time in twenty-five years, that he can just… be. He doesn’t have to be a commander, or a visionary from the future, or a husband, or a soldier, or even the human personification of loneliness he often feels like. This timeline exists regardless of if it was a mistake to create it or not. It exists. And in this timeline there’s this Steve, and this Bucky, who get to live here, and eat dinner together.

They talk about work, and about future plans for the Avengers, and about Brooklyn in the 1930s. Steve walks through his own memories with them, seeing them with new eyes: How Bucky cared for him when he was sick, built a new home for them when he was alone. Helped him when he got himself into scraps, but never told him he couldn’t hold his own. Loved him. It’s easy for Steve to see the love between them during wartime, but sitting here, listening to younger Steve and Bucky reminisce, their hands tangling under the table, he sees for the first time the spiderweb of love that defined their lives together, even before the magnifying effect of loss.

As the meal finishes and the bottle empties, younger Steve corrals them into the living room. “Put a record on, Buck,” he insists. “I’m gonna clean up a little.”

“You cooked!” Bucky protests. “I’ll do the dishes later. Come back here.”

“In a minute,” younger Steve insists. “Put a record on.”

Bucky bites his lip, then rifles through his records and finds one. “You’re still addicted to buying records,” Bucky says, fondly.

“Both of us,” Steve agrees.

“Still a dancer?” Bucky scoots the couch back a little, then slides the coffee table near the hearth, opening up a small space in the living room floor. “Not exactly a modern record, but I’ve had enough of jazz for a while,” he says, and puts on a mid-sixties record Steve remembers vaguely.

_(If I got on my knees and I pleaded with you, not to go, but to stay in my arms  
Would you walk out the door, like you did once before?)_

Bucky extends his hand.

If Steve does this he will shatter.

And yet.

For a brief moment, they sway together, with space between them. Then, Bucky loops his arms around Steve’s neck and steps into him, and Steve’s hands immediately travel to Bucky’s waist—the opposite of how they occasionally used to dance in the thirties, drunkenly, in their apartment, when Steve was small.

Steve closes his eyes. The music floods his senses like a memory. Without thinking he tucks his face toward Bucky so his nose is in the crown of his head, inhaling the familiar scent of him, so close to one he knew yet so different. Somewhere in the tangled mess of time it’s New Year’s Eve 1939 and everyone knows war is coming and they’re dancing in their shared apartment drinking beer pretending it’s champagne they can’t afford. Somewhere else he’s in a French bar and Peggy is in a red dress and Bucky’s eyes are ferociously focused as they travel over his new body. Somewhere else in Wakanda Bucky’s choosing cryo and Steve’s got a hand on his jawline and Bucky tilts his head into the touch but that’s it, that’s all, Steve didn’t say it, he didn’t say anything. But he knew. He knew then what he knows now.

“Come on, you big softie,” Bucky’s saying, his voice very quiet, “If you start that I’m gonna start and then Stevie’s definitely going to start and then we’re gonna flood the place.”

Steve pulls back slightly and Bucky runs a thumb across his cheek, swiping away the tears Steve didn’t realize were falling - his metal thumb, so gentle, so unselfconscious. “You’ve seen a lot,” Bucky says.

“Sorry,” Steve stammers. “I just—I miss you. My you.”

Bucky’s eyes travel over his face. “I know. Do you ever regret it? Coming back?”

He does and he doesn’t. “No,” he says, because how could he look at the concerned twist of Bucky’s mouth and say otherwise? “I wish I had slowed down. I wish I had been honest."

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Mr. Sacrifice.”

“You of all people should know that ain’t gonna happen,” Steve says, and he finds himself smiling despite it all.

Younger Steve comes into the living room then with a pack of cigarettes, grumbles about Bucky trash-talking his favorite jazz, throws an Ellington record on—god, he is predictable!—then opens the windows. They share a few cigarettes and Steve tries to get his head on straight and waves off an offer to sleep off the wine and the dancing there. Younger Steve walks him to the door and leaves Bucky cursing goodnaturedly at the dishes that younger Steve clearly didn’t start. 

“You don’t have to be alone,” younger Steve says. “I mean, without you, we wouldn’t have this. You’re part of it. Come back tomorrow.”

Tomorrow’s too soon. But he does go back.

 

If he buys that record younger Bucky played, if he plays it in his studio with the shades drawn and sits on the floor and runs his thumbs over the device that brought him here all these years ago—if he sketches the fading memory of his Bucky’s secret teasing smirk reserved just for him and ruins it spilling tears and choking on his breath—if he does that, no one has to know. It can be a private ritual. It can be the catharsis that keeps him getting up and improving and preparing the Avengers program for the oncoming threats.

In this timeline, SHIELD still needs him. These lives he’s altered need him. He will do right by this world he has created with the choice on that platform all those years ago. 

It’s not all so bad. In a way, he got everything he wanted. And each day that passes is one day less to live. And in his dreams he makes a different choice.

**Author's Note:**

> I am so grateful for all the comments and kudos on the previous chapter of this fic. This chapter was inspired by user NotMySteve who asked for a scene from Steve's life. I haven't written fic in a long time and seeing comments and kudos has been a bright spot in my life so thank you everyone.


End file.
